Woodstock Film Festival box office manager Callie Lockhart said the addition of the Orpheum Theater in Saugerties has been well received by audiences and the filmmakers.

"We've had filmmaker...

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Saugerties Welcomes the Festival

Woodstock Film Festival box office manager Callie Lockhart said the addition of the Orpheum Theater in Saugerties has been well received by audiences and the filmmakers.

"We've had filmmakers who specifically asked to screen their work at Saugerties and host their after parties in town," Lockhart said.

"The Great Chicken Wing Hunt" ends with a party with a guessable menu at Stella's Station on Partition Street in Saugerties.

"We're going to be serving the winning sauce from the movie with our wings," bartender Melanie Cane said. "We don't take reservations, but there's a lot of buzz about it so we're expecting an overflow crowd."

Filmmaker David Becker of "To Be Forever Wild" also chose the Orpheum for his friends and family screening and after party.

"It's been a very positive response all around for filmmakers and viewers," Lockhart said.

WOODSTOCK — Short films. Are they the calling card of filmmakers hoping to land a feature? Or are they their own story gems, whole and complete as they are?

In a YouTube/Vimeo universe where attention spans have been whittled to microbits, viewers gobble up short films like a tapas banquet.

In U.S. markets, fans of short films can only see them at film fests or on the Internet. Use of short documentaries and cartoons as openers for featured work at theaters has been replaced by preview screenings. Even in art houses where independent films reign, shorts rarely are included before the features as in the past.

"It's a stepping stone," Woodstock Film Festival co-founder Laurent Rejto said. "We're running a panel discussion this year about moving from shorts into features. One thing we're particularly proud of here is that we've had 30 filmmakers who started at our festival with shorts and have returned with features."

The creative freedom and low budgets of shorts allow filmmakers to show their talents without risking substantial investments.

"I shot my whole film on my iPhone," said David Kaplan of "Where Beasts Dwell," his 12-minute profile of ceramic artist Kathy Ruttenberg, "I did add in some audio later, but all the special effects were done with a $2 app called 8mm," he said.

Kristian Berg, a staff producer at PBS, found the short form useful for profiling the life of artist Gendon Jensen, who works exclusively in pencil to render illustrations of bones.

"His work is so fine, I had to wait for the HD levels to get good enough that viewers would really get the subtle quality of what he does," Berg said of Jensen. Berg's 28-minute short, "Poustinia" is complete in itself. "But there's so much more to the story." he said.

Rejto, who previously did an eight-minute gallery loop about Jensen and worked on Berg's film, said the progression of films eventually should end in a 90-minute feature about Jensen.

The Woodstock Film Festival team screens 1,000 short films each season, selecting fewer than 100 for festival viewers.

"We have a strong interest in cultivating great short filmmakers because they come back to us later with features," Rejto said.

"Rob Meyer won best student film here for 'Aquarium' and now is back with a feature, 'A Birder's Guide to Everything.' It was co-written by Luke Matheny, who won the Academy Award in 2010 for his short, 'God of Love.'"

Brooklyn filmmakers Jennie Allen and Michael Fix, formerly of Rosendale, have three feature projects in the works, but used characters in their short film "Relics" as a basis for one feature. "We have two offers for distribution of "Relics" — both in Europe, where short film is regarded as its own art form and taken more seriously," Allen said.

"The film was shot completely in Gardiner," Fix said. "We financed it through Indiegogo and came in under budget. So it's great to get offers for distribution in France and Ireland that are non-exclusive; we can continue with it on festival circuits."

Rejto added: "There are so many ways you can lose an audience in a film. Bad sound, score, filming, line delivery. And if you only have a few minutes to tell your story, you have to do all of it well in a small space.

"In selecting shorts for our festival, it may sound corny, but we look for soul," he said.